


Keter

by thinskinnedcalciumsipper



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Other, deiphilia, stanbill 2017
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 09:05:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7041832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinskinnedcalciumsipper/pseuds/thinskinnedcalciumsipper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>content warning! intimated child abuse, violence, gore, imminent character death</p><p>stan, an underachieved old east coast bachelor, surviving his estranged brother, is summoned upon his death to inherit his estate, where he discovers something which shouldn't have been discovered. pls write me a better summary</p><p>Keter (Crown) represents the first stirrings of Will within the Godhead, a primal impulse that precedes even thought but which is essential for any action to take place. It is also called Ayin (Nothingness), for it was out of the infinite void that the Almighty created. When a Jew seeks a oneness with God through ecstatic prayer or meditation, it is to this state of Nothingness, the annihilation of all ego, that she aspires. -- Zohar</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stan and the dead

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall  
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,  
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon  
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils  
With the green world they live in; and clear rills  
That for themselves a cooling covert make  
Against the hot season; the mid forest brake,  
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:  
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms  
We have imagined for the mighty dead;  
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:  
An endless fountain of immortal drink,  
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

\-- Endymion by Keats

*

[when he's done he will give her to the earth;](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASGj9GjnU8)  
[a starving animal will always feed.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASGj9GjnU8)  
[God as his witness he'll smile](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASGj9GjnU8)  
[as he watches her bones slide between its teeth.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASGj9GjnU8)

[Never grow old,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASGj9GjnU8)  
[never grow old,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASGj9GjnU8)  
[in the land where she'll never grow old](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASGj9GjnU8)

*

He learned his brother was dead by a call from a police officer (“I’m sorry for your loss,” she recited,  
tomboyish and prim) in the first blurry myrtle moments of a dreary Easter morning -- he looked out at the sleepy tattoo of bright sideways rain on his misted window and heard in the fuzz of the pink acrylic receiver held trembling-tight to his ear a strange young woman stridently insist, "Stanley Pines, is this Stanley Pines? It’s about your brother… I’m sorry for your loss.”

He wasn’t sorry, not exactly. He felt thoughtful, and still. It’d been a long time since his brother was anything but a title to him. A lifetime ago, entropy rended the natural tenderness which once bonded him to his twin as certainly as he was drawn by the earth – he was an old man, now, a waning white hook of man with deep creases delineating his thoughtful frown, only an obscure blush of russet remaining in his hair and a sybaritical softness infesting his broad strong core, but he recalled, sitting up silently in dawning strains of mute blue light in his comfortable old recliner at the other end of the country of an unfeeling young woman who asked impatiently if he was there – once, an age ago in an innocent kingdom by the sea, tucked into a cozy dark and the toddlers cot his brother once shared with him, his hand which had been smooth and small as a bean clasped in his, he’d promised they would never, ever part.

“I’m here,” he replied quietly.

His brother had passed silently in his sleep about a night ago, the young woman explained, very peaceful, very painless. A relative was required to identify and collect the body, to attend to funerary arrangements. She understood he lived out of state.

“I do,” he said.

“Can we expect your assistance in these matters, Mr. Pines?” she asked him, perfectly perfunctory, alto, rose gold timbre, notes of Spanish. She sounded pretty.

Stan remembered his brothers perpetually speckled and crackled spectacle glass and peculiar teeth. He remembered his brothers odor of eraser rubber and soaked earth. He remembered the tempest of intense jealousy he'd endured when his brother discovered him kissing their pretty pet brunette in the fern glen behind the high school the night of sophomore homecoming. His sweaters, his chin, the ovid subordination in his gesture of averting his eyes, clinging to him, Pop yelling. He remembered his eleventh and twelfth fingers.

“Mr. Pines?” prompted the little woman, and Stan grunted to affirm his attendance.

“Can we expect you?”

“You can,” he agreed, not reluctantly, exactly, only with weariest relent.

He needed nearly nothing. He had nothing. He put two cleanish shirts and some underpants in his old cracked glossy tortoiseshell leather valise, the one he'd distributed heroin from in the 90s, a flask.

He dressed. He looked at his mattress on the floor, his rainbow of brown bottles.

The pretty child that lived across the way of him, who he sometimes brought chocolate and butterscotch, chatted to him at his car about a beloved moppet (cords of red yarn, becoming her mistresses crowning glory) which she waved emphatically at Stan until her mother theatrically intercepted her – her mother was pretty, too, long fawn brown suede coat, beautiful coat, boldly red lipstick, and she smiled kindly at Stan in gratitude, ushering her child up the posied road to school –- Stan thought about that a while, watching the prosaic apartment station drift away out the dusty rearview window -- he descended out of the familiar bleeding gray panorama of the decayed cityscape he haunted, with its celestial castles of whitewashed barlights and bleeding neon, ladders of wet rust standing hung from heaven, over the ribboned hips of bridges, over crawling flats of gray devastation where children in colorful pillowy coats did not play, wire, stripes, glass, into disorderly cults of shops and broad roads on tall stilts washed in brilliant filth which thinned and fell gradually, gradually -- the sun emerged reflected amber-warm up from shattered waters but the landscape he watched fly from him was sodden, still, and solemn, only haunted by the specter of remote rhetorical blue until a clean violet night dressed him in descending dark -- until he passed with wraithlike quiet over undeveloped road, then patchwork pasture, then dunes of field, dulled with winters tenement, dull in the night, mounds, cairns, the horror of violet titans, the Rocky Mountains on the horizon, a frame of dark moons obliterating the frail female land, deep in the night, the black monotony of the lee, until over them all closed the covetous claws of the long dark of the pines.

The air changed, robust and bracing -- the light which stirred somewhere in the wood looked old, weary and thinned -- the sea was in it -- it was cold. It’d been a long time since he'd seen this land. His brother had been young, though he hadn’t known it at the time – so had he. They’d fought. They always fought.

Stan ate coffee and the ruby red offal of a slice of warm cherry pie for breakfast at a diner growing in the thin dingy heath in a lapse in the land. Stan leaned his cheek on the chilled window stain, watching the dawn grow on the orb of crushed fern and infected curly willow which drew the boundary of the spoons parking, dull and greenish on the gravel and trash as an old penny. He slept, sitting up, and dreamt of nothing. The phantom of a female childs tremulous soprano playing at the boundary of him murmured, yelped, quietly cried.

He was met in damp, florid evening up the road parting impenetrable walls of pine in a pebbled clearing inhabited by a loop of drive and an assembly of squashed waterrotten public offices in the spoonbelly cloverwild -- unemphatic condolences exchanged with thanks, Stan very stiff, he disliked police very much -- a policeman with no attributes at all, touching his shoulder, led him into the door of the eldest, ugliest, brownest gingerbread house at the end of the block, spillage of briar and ivy from an arrow of thunderblack pine infesting its phases, phrased in twins of frail naked sycamore -- up the squatting stair, in the door, the musted scarlet carpet and metered light, installed in cells in pocked ceiling panels, the hateful mercenary seeking sort of light which pervades all public offices, face of a woman, the receptionist, red lips, ghosts in posters he couldn't see, the long, long, silent and empty hall, a kind of doctor wearing a white coat over her dress soberly greeted him, down he followed her, long red nails, clipboard, in sealing double doors like on an industrial refrigerator, into a well dug into the earth, walls of concrete, down into the nauseating bluepale riverglow -- a silent room, an empty room, like skyscraper windows, the many many small square silver doors installed sequence in the walls and something under bright light under a sheet -- Stan didn't feel well -- "Mr. Pines," asked the policeman, "is this your brother?" It was.

He'd anticipated comments on their appearance (they were identical) there were none, and he felt under his unwellness something like relief. The officers, doctors, assorted professionals that took turns questioning and instructing him were mercifully succinct. Numbers, addresses, references were accumulated for him. Someone put in his hands a paper cup of hot coffee.

Stan was offered a chaperone to his brothers home, a shack in the belly of a valley beneath the town, a pretty lady police officer, which he smilingly accepted. He remembered snow and his scowling brother drawing flowerfall of bright blood from his nose. He derived no pleasure from the pines or the gentle brunette which smiled sadly at him. He felt as if he hadn't slept in a long, long time.

He descended with her (she indulged in intimate detail in descriptions of her pet golden retriever, which charmed him) through the pine, young stock, slender and pale, lit with humanity, the colorful beetles of cars opposing him, a park, a brief scene of clean, eternal, content domesticity (a single story town scattered slapdash around a federally funded museum and aged grocery, his chaperone rolled down the passengerside window to wave at a rosy old woman paused at an intersection) into the crest of the wood, into its abrupt depths, an elderly, solemn wood, pine and vine and shock of deathly white eyed birch, an overgrown road met with pinhole waterfalls, explosions of fruit-colored wildflower, staggered slates of black clay and emerald moss, brightness on insects wings, the violet of the evening, hooked in the tenebrous hummock, he descended to a barren glen in a fence in which rotted the cottage.

"Sorry," said the bosomy brunette, slamming her door behind her, standing to take his bag from the bed of his limping red jalopy before being gently waved away -- she had wide hips, which wiggled with the gun on her belt as she walked, and a mole by her eye, and her khaki trousers were a little too small, and she talked too much -- "must be tough, I can't imagine, will you be okay?"

Stan smiled at her.

His brothers house in the pine wild he barely remembered was a relic of the trail, proximal to the old English style, cool, tall, rotting -- it was uncomfortably vacant, filled with unpleasant clean odors and assorted scholarly filth, very dark inside, very dark in the door -- Stan was walking, Stan stood -- ugly rug, immaculate dining table, a dimly familiar room, the orderly hem of drawn curtains, checkered chair, a hectic desktop over which fell a schism of lemony light, crushed papers, graph, glittering powder of graphite, bronze mathematical utensils, a shard of shattered plastic shaped like a star, a bright pink penny, a glass of water supporting an orbiting equation of illuminated dust, a sketch of female form on a scrawled rehearsal to request a research grant, the cloudy rubber oval of a baby bottle nipple and alarming red wrapper of his brothers particular favorite candy in a wire waste paper basket, an amateurish oil painting of a schooner in a storm initialed "S.P.," Stan touched wonderingly each of these things, Stan looked long at every artifact he excised from the cold guts of the treadworn room, chrysanthemum of crushed tissue, a hooked leaden nail, a star of David, Stan was gently, gently crying. It was calm and almost kind. It was absolutely quiet.

Stan didn't remember sleeping but he woke. In the frank blankness of deep dark he found the switch of a desk lamp and sat at it, unseeing -- somewhere in the house a clock chimed midnight and Stan, full of sighs, began very wearily to sort out what among his brothers remains would be thrown away.

He worked as the moon fell, as the stars blinked out, he shucked his jacket and slept once in a sofa in some office filled with weird things, he woke hurting with hunger and treated it with some of an enormous receptacle of bad bourbon he'd found nuzzled in a wardrobe drawer. He filled a psychic ark with evidence his brother had lived. He found in one of many red leatherbound journals a shock of a sunfaded image of himself, a ruddy youth with a black eye, holding hands with his twin and loudly smiling and he folded up and cried a while.

He couldn't see the bedroom. He couldn't see the form of his brother impressed in his shroud. Not yet, never.

He was faded and faint. He hurt. He descended in a daze (the maidenly neck of amber bottle grasped tight in his insistent fist) a concealed stair beneath the ugly rug from the parlor hall into the cellar.

The dark of the land was good to Stan, soothing and cool, still like the sea, like the sea, placid over a vault of dusk blue and calm over a middens of pale bones diffused in the dark, nothing he knew, descending, he touched aluminum, tin, iron, steel, stone. Even the bauble of tepid light he incited in the cement block ceiling was blended to pleasance by the caul of sure earth. Even the deadly tread of his mortal foot was alleviated and lightened. The floor of the cellar was loose earth, filled with small shining somethings, sharp things, spectral vermin, shuttered shadow, a brief tube of pallid calcium. He was drunk.

Shutter series of room suspended on beams of bare fair wood, anointed by pinned canvas tarp and winged concrete. Glass and iron, containers and containments. Steel sarcaphogi. Eviscerated trunk of a monitor. Hospital stuff. Lengths of chain. Tubing. Wire bars. Dark marks. Bone. Nailed closed. Blocked sprayed warning red writing -- do not open. A table of dark dim metals Stan in his agitation upset, kicking it -- in a narrow grave (he was drunk) he saw (peering, reeling in the ocean dim) a body – a childlike body, wan and gaunt, naked, long, long hair, – it was art, Stan thought, a sculpture, plaster cast -- it had no hands, Stan saw with a disoriented lurch – the pins of its pitifully thin arms ended in pointing wrist bones wrapped in dappled skin – Stan stumbled backwards, groped blindly for something to fall on, scattering some tinkling stuff, struck his shin hard, his hand at his collar, his temple, clutching his hair in astonishment pitching quickly into something indomitable, abominable – the bottle of liquor crunched underfoot, the thin light winced and winked -- as he watched, unbelieving, a distant silver reflection of the face of a girl prone in a cradle of bright sleet looked at him –- her chin tipped, her long hair fell away and her eye opened and she saw him.

"Hello?," he heard his own voice saying, only it sounded very small, inconsequential in the enclosing riot and ruin which seemed vast as space around him, "hello? Oh, honey," a catch, a missed stitch, he drew up and stood still, shivering helpless at her periphery, "oh, what was done?," he heard, "honey, what was done to you?"

When Stan pushed away an intercepting tower of refuse with a shattering crash, put out his hands to her, the girl, the poor little girl, to hold her waist to hold her up, the needles of her pale arms rose in response -- her bones touched tenderly the hollow of Stans temple and cheek -- Stan was sick, though he managed to replace her carefully down before bolting for the stair, he didn't make it.

He finished and found he could not rise -- on the floor he hugged his knees like a child -- he put his face helplessly into his hands and wept -- the light left and seeped capriciously back -- it stank, the textures of dense dust around him was suddenly unendurable -- he coughed, he wretched, he looked for the alcohol, he made a little lost sound he should have been ashamed of -- he looked and saw she watched him, her very long hair tumbled around her pitiful thin little limbs, lying in loops into the unfeeling earth, the poor girl, the poor girl, she was so small, she lay placidly still, softly shining in the umber dark, and silent, and one of her eyes was...

Lifting her was like picking up a doll. She was so small. Her gestures were tentative and tortuously slow -- her limbs inched around him like the forests blind limbs feeling for sunshine -- Stan held her knees and shoulders and was prodded by her prominent ribs. He looked into her face and thought with a chill which almost became illness he couldn't stand to see her -- she couldn't be true -- the poor little girl.

Somehow, Stan found his way out of the dark. He was aware of a pinch and liquid on his shin -- he was cut and bleeding. There was a doll in his arms. He sat at the kitchen table he stumbled upon, looked into the face of the mannikin he held -- he wished he hadn't -- she was alive, not a body, he was drunk, but he thought she was wrong -- something was wrong -- she stared at him as though she'd never seen a man -- Stan wished for more bourbon -- she didn't blink, didn't reply to the tremulous touch of his hand on her face, pinching her chin, his face at her, intently examining her -- "honey, talk to me," he rasped, soothing away from her face her wild hair -- "what happened to you? Talk to me. Are you okay?"

There was a girl in his arms, naked, pitifully thin, pale as the moon -- only a little girl -- he grappled to understand it. An arrow of rosy sun pierced the room, slipped into the yielding cheek, luminous eyelash of the poor little girl compliant in his large hard arms.

Stan, spinning, was able to strip off and arrange his shirt around the shoulders of the girl from the dark before he put down his head on hers and dropped out of the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i want MONEY


	2. Stan and the dark

[get the car](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)  
[get the chain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)  
[kick his pride](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)  
[get him soaked, hit, run](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)  
[dip your toes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)  
[in my mouth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)  
[we make love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)

[and we can go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)  
[and we can go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)  
[and we can go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)  
[and we can go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)

[we're covered by sacred fire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)

[when you come to me you come to me broke](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3diz8I0AVVk)

*

Stan stirred with the initial saturated aquamarine strains of assorted strings, cephalopod cello, sparkling harp, a glaucous serpent of twining violin, the first movement of a pale, narrow, long-haired day he knew in his barnacle-encrusted heart would ruin him – he woke, without knowing, saw a distorted glass of green light in a close cobalt heaven, thought he was twenty years old, reassembled with effort his wincing limbs and closed up and faded into a distant summer in which his brother by the great green sea was small and smiling, blushed with sun, dappled, dimpled, their reddish hair, glossy strawberry knees distended around pale marks of scars, feet in foam, spectacles kept together with swatches of sticky tape, his brother was eating a jalopy red ice lolly and smiling at him, vast alp of the viridian sea capped with crusts of pale salt, vault of faultless bright blue, a tiny childs scarlet smile, his freckled, florid, apple-bright hand held out welcoming to him.

Stan sat up. He was ill, still drunk and felt silly. He was fifty years too old to be passing out at a bender. His head he rolled dotingly in the palm of his hand.

Wobbling a lot (he’d really did it this time) he closed a curtain over the unbearable light. He rinsed his hands, brought water to his lips to drink. He wore only his undershirt and slacks. He felt far from himself, and blurry, and sad. He wished for a drink to dull the falling blade.

He sat. He sighed. He pinched his nose (discovering he’d misplaced his spectacles) and unfolded uncomfortably in his chair, opening slowly his sodden leaden limbs and recalling only when he kicked her the girl from the earth.

He sat away and looked. For a while he simply could not understand her. For some reason, he remembered his brother as a child, standing in the sea. The girl was wadded up like refuse frankly naked scattered on the patterned nylon tile at his feet – he goggled at her, for he couldn’t understand – her long long hair and long bones, the mystery of her newness, the astonishing silence in the long look she lent him, some upsetting asymmetry he couldn’t quite describe.

As he stared, she drew up – slowly as precambrian animals or old woeful things move, she sat at his side – boldly, she leaned on him, put her chin trustingly on his knee – she looked and looked and looked at him and he couldn’t speak a word.

His shirt with which he’d dressed her some time in his terrible dream fell to her knees and spilled all around like a frock, open, haphazardly hung over her minuscule shoulders, a rended wedding dress. Her face was like a childs face but if he looked intently he thought he could see she was not a child at all – only something dressed as a child – something wrong with her eye. Devotedly, she rolled her temple on his thigh. He was drunk. He didn’t understand.

She looked at him, up at the tower of human man atop which Stan wrestled a terrible angel; his brother, whom he loved, had harmed her, a helpless little girl. He…

She climbed upon him. She leaned her cheek on Stans shoulder and compulsively he clasped it there, feeling sickness and an amazing sadness.

“What’s your name?,” Stan asked her, ashamed of the stuttering shyness which shattered his voice, very ashamed.

She was silent but only looked at him as if she were invented to.

“What’s your name, honey?,” Stan insisted, timidly touching her arm and hurting at the sensation of her prominent bones perceptible through the profane stuff of his shirt. He hurt very much. “What’s your name? How old are you?”

She shimmered in the pallid newlight like a seashell. Perhaps she seeped into it. Her little wrist (she had no hands, no hands, no hands) Stan realized rested coiled loyally around the nape of his neck. He looked at her and saw one of her eyes was blotted out, rotting, wrong.

She clung to him like he would save her and Stan couldn’t conceive of forcing her away, the unlucky unhappy thing, the poor little thing, so with her he stood, stumbled about like a toddler with a doll, to set a pot to boil, on tiptoe to rifle in the dark (clumsily she caught his hand and tried to insert it in her mouth) opening paper packages, mixing a colorless gruel, holding her on his hip he urged her to eat, she wouldn’t – sitting, cajoling, he put a spoon of obliterated oats insistently to her lips and she would only look at him in mute amazement – only then, he discovered (opening gently, gently her lips with his inquisitive thumb) she had no teeth – she had no tongue – only an interrupted incarnadine crest like a coxcomb at the end of her pale mouth – Stan stared at it, and gently, gently, gently shut her lips, and looked at her, and felt tears pricking his eyes – the blond winglet of her bony shoulder slipping from her raiment he covered over in his trembling hand and she would only look back out at him from the soft ichthyic amazement she wore like her long dim hair, her pale peachish cheeks, her indolent and infantile ununderstanding.

She would drink the milk Stan decided was not too sour, with devoted coaxing, though she fumbled and fought it and spilled a lot over her front. He sat and supped her and saw and saw her and thought drunkenly this was what being a mother might be like.

He had to call the police. He had to call an ambulance. Helplessly he lay his shuddering hand over his eyes. A sob escaped him.

All the time she was looking at him. She seemed to see him so well. Under her cotton fairy weight he struggled to bear up. Salt stung a cut in his lip he couldn’t recall collecting. He would drown in her quiet. He would die.

“Let’s dress you,” Stan said, weakly facsimileing a chipper tone of doting authority, “what do you say, honey? Aren’t you cold?”

If she was, she wouldn’t say. She insisted with her spectral gripping wrists on being carried. In his arms she remained deathly cold.

He found it out – he couldn’t say when he guessed, he only somehow knew – he couldn’t bear it – in the dim den of his brothers bedroom, which moaned woefully underfoot and smelled still of the sticking fetidity of masculine sleep, in that malignant stagnant dark, out of the still limbo beneath the stone cold bed (he’d dreamed there, there he’d stopped dreaming, his only brother) Stan drew an ebony chest containing orderly rows of shining instruments, young saws and prods, packages of acrylic tongues and membranes he didn’t know, many hazard orange flutes of medicines, glass ampoules and silver needles arranged in rows in a frame of felt, an amputated cupped bisque paw the size of a quails egg, rope and rope and rope, two discolored dresses.

Concealed in shadow close by there lay a link of heavy chain installed in a platform bolted to the wall, ending in a dog collar. He couldn’t look at it. He couldn’t bear it.

The girl clinging to him had closed her lips on the prominent bone of his collar and mouthed there idly. His hand was subsumed by her crawling, curling hair, his shoulder clumsily clutched by her, as he clutched her – urgently, emergently, as though he could carry her out of woe. He extricated one-handed from the deplorable dark the less soiled of the dresses he saw and stumbled in his haste exiting the tomb of room, and the girl was silent.

He carried her out of the hall, out of the house into a gasp of bright space, extricated her from him and set her aside to tumble into the mossy spotted earth making the yard carved out of the placid pine wood where on hands and knees like a penitent he defeated his weeping. His gastropodal entrails infesting his belly he felt. Sickening things flirted with him – he forced them away. A glaucous crocodile-claw on his throat he broke. He inched up onto his aching haunches, towards an asylum of champagne heaven phrased by blue pine – he lurched forward again. Again, he vomited.

It was afternoon, he registered with dim surprise, warm and soft and silent. A palm of fluffy stuff drifted starwards from a foam of loam and fern, a brown tern on a brown fence, unspeaking, an early star.

Her chin was in his broad lap, her limbs slithering into him, her covetous clutching coming over his rotund breast, his broad arms, his thick neck; childishly he wiped his eyes and lips on the back of his hoary hand and folded his arms around her, picking her out of the earth and pecking her on her unresponsive eye.

Calling her (flinching) "angel" and "kiddo" he begged her, what do you want? Sweetie, what should I do with you? What should I do? the tern sang Bizet and fled away and the star met her daughter and Stan, shuddering now and then, dragged the pale thing swaddled in his shirt to the crushed ruby jalopy (he shuffled her hair, shushed her shuddering lips, kissed the beckoning bones she emphatically conferred to him.)

Providentially (Stan was wore, sore, Stan was spinning sitting still, Stan was terrified) Stan’d endured a wayward youth which'd equipped him uniquely well for driving under lamentation – the maw of the wood was becoming blue, and he was quiet, and quiet together, priest and petite confessor, they traveled up from the wound in the land where his brother had rotted (he’d left in his distraction the keys in the ignition) and intended never to set foot in his brothers house again.

Strapped in beside him (composing the driver and passenger seat was an old-fashioned uninterrupted pill of moldering acrylic, sunstung under the gaze of dusty blued dash glass) she wriggled relentlessly.

The wood was tall and full and seamed itself overhead, enclosing him with her in their aquarium a twinkling dim labyrinthine green, poor Stan -- her mouth clapped at him, her cheek pleadingly inclined -- he thought he saw something moving in the trees, he was driving a little too fast to be sure -- he was driving a little too fast (he'd really like a drink) -- she’d put out her arms to him over and over as he tried not to see. How he wanted a drink. He tended only a little too far to the left, out of the sheer flight through the unfeeling smeared sparkling wood, and said out loud in a paroxysm of temper to the unhappy creature crooning to summon his attention, "doll, settle down before you wreck us!"

Stan, poor Stan, who’d loved his brother very much, was drunk, still, and sick with drink and stunned with misfortune and afflicted with an acutely stuttering and tender human heart, and poor sinning mortal Stan saw the old man that came from the wood for a long time – for a long time, a poor wasted crook with a vacant face obscured in wild briar of white beard, his fist gripped the wheel, for a long time, a scream marinated on the shelf of his teeth, for a long time, a long time, he watched the muzzle of his iron gait collapse a pinkish spindled knee, then a hollow hip in its shroud of soured cotton, then a wilted withdrawing shoulder, then the unholy deep matrix of opening eyes and jalopy red mouth and the horrible hand -- an old man with a long beard, gobbled up by him, he felt the thump and damp crunch under him, under the order of his own hand – the hood of his car nodded melodramatically, tortuously slowly, she crawled around in the flushed shoulder of budding peat -- a spot of blood the size of a ladybird translucent and horrible red wandering the windshield, the jocular phrases of deep green, blue -- he tore out the keys and the instance and entirety of the silence that shut around him made him want to die.

"Stan,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please fix my Garb. Make it good Garb. So i can impress girls


	3. intermission

[and I'll see you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vOg0HyJpvI)  
[and you'll see me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vOg0HyJpvI)  
[and I'll see you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vOg0HyJpvI)  
[in the branches that blow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vOg0HyJpvI)  
[in the breeze](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vOg0HyJpvI)

[I'll see you in the trees](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vOg0HyJpvI)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :B


	4. Stan and the woods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> please can you do me a favor. do me the writing that you put at the start of the story so people read it. please read my garbage water

[浮足立つ そのステップを真似て](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5QvrGxTnQ)  
[ワンツースリー ワンツースリー](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5QvrGxTnQ)  
[浮足立った その頭は今 マダガスカルあたり](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5QvrGxTnQ)  
[透明になって 夜に溶けたい](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5QvrGxTnQ)  
[今夜 空気みたい marry me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5QvrGxTnQ)  
[僕は何にもなくなりたい](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5QvrGxTnQ)  
[街の光 ライトマーブルカラーで 僕を襲う](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5QvrGxTnQ)  
[東京タワーにのぼって 深夜0時](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5QvrGxTnQ)  
[僕はその赤になる](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5QvrGxTnQ)

*

She was pretty, Stan decided -- she was somehow difficult to see even if Stan looked right at her -- she looked familiar, somehow -- he thought he might've known someone like her when he was younger, someone that looked just like her -- pretty, brief, sweet -- the force of her eye held him like the arm of amorous Apollo, her voluminous curls, her mild smile.

The hooks of her wrists rested together in lamblike docility in the palm of his hand as he hauled her up to him, her curlyheaded little head coming to his shoulder -- he patted her and she bleated in plaintive pleasure -- her head pressed insistently up under his hand. Her loose, confused smile was the size, colour, texture of a white cream pink frilled rose leaf.

Together, they watched the old man he'd murdered flapping in the furrow of smashed blue pineblade cut for him by the hysteric arc of the car -- his spare checkered teeth clattering, his white arachnid hands on tethers of skeletal wrist indicating in insectile desperation heaven, earth, and stan, rolling, roiling, starting, as if in surprise. His rheumy dim eyes did not see. His chest and collar were collapsed.

It took so long, but in time, he stopped. The hideous malodor was instantaneous.

Stan and his ward recoiled together, embraced. Insistently she knocked him, kissed his knuckle. Stan couldn't stand to look -- the old man he'd murdered had a prominent hooked nose above his dirty white beard a little resembling his own -- and someone elses -- pitted and putrid fuschia -- the hell-tar stripes smeared from his enflamed and wingless mucus membranes -- the unbearable vacancy of the chasm of his black mouth, the glossy blueish gulping wormridden beneath of his distended rheumy dim eyes obscenely shown -- Stan had seen death before -- in fact, Stan had made death before -- he thought, finally, to cover the childs face in his hand, she chirped in protest, and he couldn't stop looking -- he couldn't stop seeing the blue tubing beneath his dim gray eye, the tentacles, like the worms that would soon rise into him, smelling his dirtness, his mortal evacuation -- Stan had killed before -- the child cried -- Stan was four the first time Pop hit him, for putting his finger curiously into a flute of drink sparkling amberly on the sunglown glass coffee table top in a light gold room at the beginning of him, his very first knuckle stuck him, right cheek and temple, swift, obliterating, Stan flew away like a swatted fly, Stans astonishment, Stans agony -- he had a memory of a memory, a ghost of an innocent season reflected from somewhere else in the well the world looked -- but his secret self, his mother in him treasured a dream of an expression of gentlest tenderness on the ugly blunt face of his father which astonished him glimpsed over his shoulder on a Juneish avenue in the subtle rainbow tome of his toddlerhood, before humans escaped earth, before woe -- his mother was very beautiful, the most beautiful woman in the world, he coveted her attention with unholy passion and competed for it with savage tenacity (he would not know she was struck by a car and died, not know until many years after) he followed her through rooms, hem of her skirt in his urgently employed little fist, he was very afraid of something, he was afraid, Stan thinks he can remember, of a dream in which his father transformed into -- he remembers (harm in him, worms) he painted his eyelids like hers with thumbs of greasy sea-green he found in an acrylic pot on her pink crushed velvet crystal mirror vanity within a chaos of chains and earrings and washed himself in the stinging breath of her attar of roses and flapped around her room on her enormous shiny red high heeled shoes and she'd found him and to his astonishment she'd cried, rushing him to the bathroom sink where she washed him until he was raw and sobbing she begged him never to let his father know. His mother sewing a tartan diamond in the side of his shirt before temple (he grew so quickly, he was such a big strong boy) her quick liquid black eyes, her erect bejeweled pinkie finger sharp of the orange eye of a cigarette. Her beautiful odor, vanilla, red wine, cigarette, clove, olive flower, lotion, her distended breasts and belly, her wonderful great soft fragrant enveloping hands with beautiful long red shiny pointed nails, beautiful, beautiful, Stan loved her more than anyone in the world except for

"Did you say my name?" Stan asked her -- he asked the destroyed pale child climbing him, but thinking intently of another child, lost to him -- Stan was tired, and they lay together on a shelf of flowering earth beneath a portal to heaven in the duskgold wood into which he'd fled (bed of full springing green clover, canopy of dilapidated lichen-encrusted pine, attendant pillars of gnarled curly willow, pale as a ghost, as a corpse, climbing pulpy red muck of mushroom like organs, like blood, she pressed her cheek to his, the sycamore, following him) it was warm and dim with imminent evening, orbiting bright sprites of mayfly and larvael wyrm burgeoning in the feathery diffuse aurum air -- together, she in his arms, in the lap of the pine. Its vastness and oldness over them was good to Stan. He did not feel drunk. She bumped his temple, his eye, she nudged him urgently with her chin, he actually smiled. Her cheek aligned with his, prophecy of masculine convex fulfilled, her puerile flesh warm and damp in the wilting aridity of his winter.

How small she was.

He felt so softly for her. He was so sad. He collected gently, gently her fumbling four squeaking limbs to him and squeezed her. He repeated himself, had she said his name? but only in his mind. He shut his eyes.

It was becoming cool, but he felt uncanny warmth -- the void of the wiggling waifing in his arms -- he couldn't get up, he thought abruptly, he wouldn't be getting up again -- he'd die, he guessed.

He felt the sensation of falling from a great height. He felt he'd not open his eyes again. He fell and he fell.

He wandered a dark garden. His flashing shadow (teeth) was an adult man (fingers) that laughed at him, a familiar, familiar, familiar man. He fled. He was small. It became dark.

It was the mud in the depth of a black night, chill with impregnable mist, on his cheek the wet coarse necrotic flesh of festering trunk, stinking, moist, moonless and starless night, he was empty and he was alone.

"Little girl?" he said aloud to himself, bitterly incredulous of the sound of his voice. He was small. He was shuddering. He was strong but old and he hurt and hurt. He shuddered on hip of the bones of lightning-black tree, to his mother, in the earth, on the shelf of sticking black mud like vast quantities of coagulated blood, exposed to the cold, to the pit into constant dark, penitent. He was tired. Very tired.

Stan might have slept again, briefly. He dreamt nothing.

Stan walked. He had fled very fast and far in his desolation and lost the road and the cobbled footpaths that network the forest in proximity to civil enterprise. Through tangles of cleaving fern and thorning briar which viciously pinched his shivering arms, tentacled nettles which nipped his shins, glacial flights of the slipping middens of hideously ureac leaf and needle, his hand he put down into something dead, felt its little ribs and the inside pucker of its sticky vertebrae, its cold blood, through wastes, bog, through sticking rotting, the dark, the dark, he persisted, prudently never replying to the calls in the pit, down a long, steep height from the pine in a clover meadow on a sunlit hill. Nothing stirred in the woods. He was the only thing remaining alive.

How dark it was. Stan was certain there'd never been light.

The odor of pine (pine growth, pine decay) was dizzying, clouds of it released under his plodding shoed hooves, plumes of spicy pollen which thinned his breath, the smell of piss which infects the heavy woods, caustic, flowering, making him sick, the mist he gasped noxious. The wood touched his face, feathers, fingers, needles, drawing strokes of warm blood if he rushed, and he rushed. He disliked this dark. How dark it was. Profane blue shapes, subtle but diabolical against the encompassing dark, long claws of fern and tall feathered grass, lichen and moss, pillows of purpleblack clover. Orthogonal a wet murmur of water, a stick snap. The earth rose to meet him, the soil thinned, soured, the decayed grave of tree, eviscerated ruin, black, tied by an ivy noose dripping fluffy wet black lichens he brushed urgently aside, uncomfortable -- growing pale sapling with a calypso green leaf, confronted him. Something stirring. In the dark, something stirring.

Something was shining -- the ceiling, the diffuse fur of young green black sprayed like enthusiastically spilled blood on the elder black of the pit forming the apex of the cathedral hall he descended, became oxidized with deepest green, became seateal, then phantasmal blue wintergreen -- he approached, the softness of the upset wet black soil, upset soil, mounds, like a new grave, his knuckles, his blood, his weary peering eyes, cold dew, a copse, a lapse in the eternity of pine, in the earth, in an eclipse of snarled sycamore, twelve ladies, six twins, naked, white, writhing in the moonless deep, there, at the axis of the pentacle, something shone -- from a pit in the earth something emitted its bars of yellow light, interfacing pools and schisms, chains of gold, a great wealth of coins, a landscape of gold light tangible in space about him like the prophecy of sunlight beyond the blued wings of Pacific storm, like the undulating masses of curly hair of a young girl -- its flapping limbs were abrupt and blunt, inarticulate, approximate, beating, and black -- its face, the region of its face featureless except for an eye, very large, very large, with a black slash of pupil, like a goats, disfiguring the orb of horrible shining gold.

She was rising, the gold, serpentine, draconic, from the prone form of a man. Stan thought of a caterpillar.

There was redness all around. Red on her hands. Red on her face, illuminated by her golden light, rosy and brass, bright and dim, and red, red, red.

She was rising over the subdued form of a man.

Stan saw in the dark of the earth the face of the man he'd murdered -- half his face -- a bulbous dull eye, the pitted plum of the end of his nose, intensely purple, lip of muddied beard popped in tottish surprise at his demise, and red all over -- as he watched, she -- Stan wanted to look away, suddenly, almost irresistibly, but he wouldn't -- Stan looked -- Stan saw, in the gilt globe of brilliant light enclosing the scene of lilies and roses and the dark of deep, old, hungry black earth, Stan saw the little girls head with bestial force thrown back -- with intent and force which buckled him, she reared forward to bludgeon the devastated dark bright wet ruin of the murdered old mans smashed cup of skull -- her mouth was opening and shutting, and Stan heard distinctly in the enormous wood the wet murmur of her swallow.

"Stan," something said, and Stan recognized the voice, and he loathed it. 

"Stan," it said, androgynous, shrill, childish, chill, hideous, like a theremin reproducing a soprano, mechanical and incorrect, inevitably clear, hideously clear, as if inserted into his process, bypassing the purifying threshold of his flesh, it said, giggling, "Stan."

Stan was so tired. So tired.

He ran and ran and ran.

**Author's Note:**

> hey its me stanfucker69 i hate this trash pls volunteer to beta this awful stanbill trash. i was writing this to sell like as a novel now its 5 am an im donezo


End file.
